Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

control; one may also concentrate one’s attention on certain qualities over others, allowing one to respond to particular situations or persons with more appropriate emotional reactions, thereby reducing negative states of mind: anger will vanish if the unpleasant behavior of an individual was uncovered not to be voluntary; sadness will diminish if the value of what has been lost turns out lower; fears are dissolved when proven groundless. In this regard, self-cultivation in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism are types of affective training and strategies, where emotional self-cultivation is a central focus of moral development.

Moral decisions—in accord with a new reading of the ethical and psychological processes based on the cognitive and evaluating functions of emotions—may be traced back to the affective sphere, rather than to the rational-passional conflict.⁶ This perspective seems more effective. Undoubtedly, reading emotions in moral behavior would greatly help decipher individual and collective imaginaries in both Chinese and Western cultures.⁷ Scholars distinguish the “natural emotions” directly linked to instinctive stimuli (e.g., fear of the unknown, the joy aroused by warmth, and anger at frustration) and “moral sentiments” learnt through social experience and conformance to and negotiations with dominant moral, religious, and ideological criteria (e.g., indignation, benevolence, sense of guilt).⁸ Because of this, the affective side of personality can be seen as the basis of the construction of the individual self, with moral emotions and desires being the main elements of such construction.

Does the concept of moral responsibility in China differ from that of the West? If so, does the representation, evaluation, and conceptualization of moral responsibility differ accordingly? For the concept of responsibility, like for other notions, the difficulty consists of projecting and comparing categories of different cultural systems: it is not only a lexical question, as each concept consists of a bunch of other related concepts or sub-concepts elaborated within a certain culture, which have been intertwined and modified along the centuries.⁹ Elements of moral responsibility in Chinese culture do not concern only ethics, but entail, above all, the way the moral